Opinion - Saturday’s shooting demands reflection from the media, and all of us
The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is supposed to represent the First Amendment and the role of a free press in our democracy. On Saturday, it came to symbolize something darker. As the president was rushed off stage and journalists dove under tables, the country saw the end result of a culture that some of the institutions in that room had helped create.
Of course, neither the press nor the politicians in attendance intentionally stoked the political violence gripping America. But they have fed the public narratives so apocalyptic that unstable people see violence as justified. And too often, the rest of us have rewarded those narratives with our clicks and votes.
On the far left, Americans are told that their democratically elected leaders are fascists who wish to erase marginalized populations. Between 2022 and 2024, MSNBC mentioned President Trump alongside “fascism” 3,032 times.
On the far right, they are told that deep state traitors are seeking to replace the American people with a hoard of invaders. Tucker Carlson alone has invoked the “Great Replacement” theory in more than 400 episodes.
These narratives don’t stay contained. They are reinforced by politicians hungry for attention, and they sow seeds of glory and retribution in fragile minds. Read the manifesto of Saturday’s shooter, and it becomes clear that he viewed himself as a hero, a self-styled “ friendly federal assassin ” doing the people’s work.
This should have been cause for pause in the media, but it was not. The very next morning, Norah O’Donnell of “60 Minutes” asked Trump to respond to the shooter’s most inflammatory accusations, including that the president is a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” What more could an unstable person ask for than to have his words put to the president on national television?
Instead of platforming the shooter and his smears, the instinct should have been to interrogate the political sickness that produced his actions. That could have involved pointed questions to President Trump about his own rhetoric, but it also demanded some introspection from journalists themselves.
If the media and political elite will not take the cue, then the American people must.
We must recognize our own role. The wave of political violence on both sides is the end result of an ideological poison supplied by political extremes and distributed by many in the media. But for them to stop spreading it, we must stop consuming it. That means calling out their narratives as lies — versions of reality so filtered in darkness that they are no longer reality at all.
The vast political center in America understands this intuitively. They know the stories told on TV do not correspond to what they see in their neighborhoods. They desperately want normalcy and goodness to prevail in our discourse. Yet too often, they put the “silent” in silent majority.
But they are, indeed, a majority — consisting of not just the historic number of registered Independents but also the center across both parties. It is time for these Americans to form a political movement of their own. Even just by changing what they click on and vote for, they could alter the incentives that drive our media and political parties.
Without such a movement, the wave of political violence will likely continue. No media institution or political leader intended Saturday’s shooting to happen, nor do they recognize their role in stopping the next one.
We do not need more hollow calls for unity from those who have no intention of changing. What we need is a cultural reset: a media that covers the extremes without amplifying them, politicians who compete on ideas without declaring opponents evil, and a citizen movement strong enough to insist on both.
Nancy Jacobson is a co-founder and CEO of No Labels .
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